National relations of force interlock with international relations to form unique historical combinations

Evidence

In real history these moments imply each other reciprocally— horizontally and vertically, so to speak—i.e. according to socioeconomic activity (horizontally) and to country (vertically), combining and diverging in various ways. Each of these combinations may be represented by its own organised economic and political expression. It is also necessary to take into account the fact that international relations intertwine with these internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique and historically concrete combinations. A particular ideology, for instance, born in a highly developed country, is disseminated in less developed countries, impinging on the local interplay of combinations. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 763

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the relation-of-forces analysis as requiring both horizontal (class/sector) and vertical (national/international) axes simultaneously — a core unit in Gramsci’s analytic toolkit.
• XREF: Connects directly to how postcolonial and Islamophobia scholarship models global power: ideologies travel from metropole to periphery (Orientalism, civilizing mission).
• QUESTION: Interesting mechanism: how does an ideology born in a developed country get ‘impinged’ on local combinations — what determines which local forces it attaches to?